


Frank was my personal compensation for Calcutta

by Trismegistus (Lebateleur)



Category: Blake & Avery Series - M. J. Carter
Genre: Boredom, Denial, Drunk Sex, Drunkenness, Emotionally Repressed, Emotionally Repressed Englishmen, Friends With Benefits, Hand Jobs, M/M, Sexual Repression
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-16
Updated: 2021-02-16
Packaged: 2021-03-18 12:47:08
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,294
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29490033
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lebateleur/pseuds/Trismegistus
Summary: I liked him enormously.Avery and Macpherson, and an evening's respite from the lethargy of an ensign's life in Calcutta.
Relationships: William Avery/Frank MacPherson
Comments: 1
Kudos: 2





	Frank was my personal compensation for Calcutta

“William!”

“Good evening, Frank,” I slurred, and made to stumble past him into the bungalow. In this I was impeded by Frank’s disapproving stare and the way my vision pitched wildly about, as though I were once more aboard the ship that had brought me from England to Calcutta during the most ferocious sort of open ocean storm.

“William, you really mustn’t come home in such a state. Returning on foot in the dead of night, alone, when you can barely put one foot in front of the—good Lord, William!” he exclaimed. “Where are your boots?”

I gave up trying to push my way inside and slumped against the door jamb. “’sk O'Keefe. He’ll knows.”

It took Frank a moment to make sense of this pronouncement. “But why should O'Keefe—William! You gambled away your _boots_? To _O'Keefe_? But why? He can’t possibly have any need of…” Frank had got a shoulder under my arm without interrupting the flow of his questions, and I let him guide me through the door to a nearby chair, which I slumped into gratefully.

“Tha’ was the point,” I said, my neck lolling against the headrest. Why was my head so heavy? Why was the room spinning so swiftly? Frank had stepped away after depositing me in the seat, and whatever he was now doing generated a series of thumps and metallic clangs that sent daggers stabbing through my skull. I swallowed and blinked confusedly at the mouldering ceiling, trying not to heave.

Eventually Frank returned and put a mug of something warm into my hands. They shook, sloshing its contents over the side. I blinked and looked down at the spilt liquid spreading across my lap, and at my fingers, already starting to redden. _That is a burn,_ I thought blearily.

Frank sighed and took the mug away. I heard him place it on the deal table. A moment later he was back with a cold cloth in which he wrapped my hand. “Really, William,” he said again. “Your boots, this time?”

“It was good fun,” I said in self-defense. And it was in good fun, or at least, it had seemed humorous at the time. After all, O'Keefe had no need of my boots. Everyone at the table had known it; had laughed when he suggested the wager and laughed harder still when I accepted. And then we had laughed hardest of all once he had won them. 

I remembered being pleased by it in the moment, for I had only lost a pair of boots, not anything of value like my new pistols or my cutlery, and O'Keefe could hardly benefit from having won them. I had felt very strongly at the time that I had come out of the thing with the upper hand, but now that I was back home and slightly more sober I was no longer quite so sure. I began vaguely to wonder whether O'Keefe had perhaps made a fool of me, and if that hadn’t been his aim all along. 

The tale of my having walked home from the mess to my bungalow, barefooted like a native, would already be making the rounds. By morning it would have grown beyond all resemblance to the facts, embellished in each new telling by the speaker’s personal inclination to boredom or malice; that was how society worked in Calcutta. My head began to throb with something other than drink. 

I would need to face those tales and the men who had heard and repeated them tomorrow. But at the moment the prospect seemed very far away, and thinking it through would necessitate more effort than I could presently muster.

Frank appeared again with another damp rag, which I accepted wordlessly and began to wipe the Calcutta filth from my feet. I had a vague notion that I should feel ashamed of myself, and could not have said whether Frank’s steady presence heightened or ameliorated the sensation. 

My limbs proved uncooperative, and it was some time before I managed to accomplish anything beyond smearing more dirt about my legs. Suddenly the rag, my grime-encrusted feet, my futile attempts to clean away the omnipresent muck struck me as wholly emblematic of my presence in Calcutta, and I raised my eyes to Frank’s.

“What am I to do?” I said.

Frank sighed. “Sleep until the claret’s worn off, for a start. Then, of course, you will need to parley with O'Keefe for the return of your boots. Tomorrow morning I’ll see about getting you something to wear in the meantime. I know a man at the commissary who may be able to help—” His voice trailed off as he began to work through the details in his head.

I pushed myself unsteadily up from the chair and on to Frank’s waiting shoulder. We began to make our way laboriously toward my bed. “What would I do without you, Frank?” I asked, with no small amount of self-reproach. “I should find myself in dire straits indeed without your constant interventions.”

“Think nothing of it,” said Frank, waiving away my self-pity with his typical reluctance to be pulled into my blacker moods. We negotiated our way through the narrow doorway and into the cubicle that served me for a bedroom. Although preferable to my original quarters in the barracks, it was barely larger than a monk’s cell.

“But really, William, you should never have let this happen in the first place.”

“’S easy for you to say,” I said. “You have no vices.”

“So I have been told,” he said lightly. Frank did not drink, or gamble, or engage in the gossip and politicking that greased the wheels of Calcutta society. I had never even heard him resort to the course language that most Company recruits adopted immediately upon their arrival in India. But he did have one vice of which I was aware. I had discovered it some months ago, on an evening in which I had stumbled home in a similar state of inebriation. 

The mattress was lumpy and pungent with mildew, but I was beyond caring as I collapsed gracelessly into its embrace. The room pitched and swayed. Frank busied himself about the place, closing the crooked slatted shutters, straightening the netting over the bed, dismissing the khansaman, who had at long last deigned to appear to see to my needs. My eyes fluttered closed.

I was nearly asleep when I felt the mattress dip as Frank stretched out beside me. I made some small, inarticulate noise and earned an amused “Good night, William” in reply. The sounds of the Calcutta night closed around us. Insects whirred, frogs croaked, mosquitoes whined beyond the netting. In the street, two mongrels growled, fighting over some scrap. I felt the warmth of a hand laid lightly atop my britches.

Deep in my cups as I was, it was some time before Frank coaxed my member to wakefulness. Even once he had roused me, the whole thing had about it an air of unreality and I hovered on the edge of excitement and sleep as Frank handled me. By tacit agreement we only indulged in such peccadilloes on those nights when I returned to the bungalow so thoroughly soused I could half believe I had imagined it all upon waking. We never spoke of any of it the following morning. 

I noted as if from a far distance the furtive sounds of Frank’s eager attentions to his own member, and my breath quickened as I approached the inevitable crisis with the queer sensation that I was floating. My spasming exertions sapped the last of my energy, and I was barely conscious of Frank cleaning away the aftereffects of our efforts before I lapsed into heavy, dreamless sleep.


End file.
